I'm still a dwarf and I'm still digging a hole. (Patreon)

A pretty deep one.

Remember me saying our data for FET basically had the cohesion and structure of overcooked spaghetti?    ...That's still mostly true, and will remain like that for awhile... 

But I did manage to put the bulk of the files into a logical folder structure. It's a thing of beauty... When you're used to  having to go on the equivalent of a camping trip when trying to find a specific file. It wasn't so bad for book 3 and book 4 files, but the first two books where pretty horrible in that regard. 

I was playing with the idea of splitting things into a love/slave route, but since both routes of the same book make extensive use of the same files it was much simpler to have an overarching folder structure split into book 1, book 2 etc.  And yes, that's something we didn't do right from the start.

Moving the files around wasn't that hard, but making sure the scripts could find them afterwards wasn't as straightforward. I could use some automated "search & replace" functionality for the bulk of the new folder paths, but there was also a lot I had to  do manually for reasons(I don't want to bore you to death) which I won't go into here.

At first it was all about just making certain there was some logic behind where we are saving our stuff and I trying to do my best as to not molest everyone's savegames into oblivion.

Then I started to discover more and more things which could be done better, more efficiently.  At first I wasn't going to touch those things because I still didn't want to break too many savegames.  Then I started coming across more and more exceptions where I couldn't move the data without destroying savegames. When those exceptions started piling up, I finally just said... "Fuck it, I'm going scorched earth."

Not so much "scorched eath" as in it'll destroy all savegames, but I no longer take older savegames into account when changing things and now I'm just doing whatever is necessary to bring files into the fold. 

Adding structure and putting things "where they belong" is strangely satisfying to my mind. It's not like I can't become bored doing it, but the satisfaction I feel afterwards is like scratching an itch. And it's so much easier to find stuff quickly now! 

One of the things I also did is decouple background and foreground images. We combined those a lot during book 1 and 2 (and stopped doing that in the other books)   Decoupling is nice because it decreases the size of our scripts and the script size is responsible for how fast FET loads. Whether you have to call a background once and can forget about it or have to call it for every frame, makes a difference. I still have a few of those combination files, but 99% of it is gone.

Most of that was done automatically but it caused many, maaany glitches. I think most of my time has been spent tracking down those by playing both routes of the first two books and fixing whatever got broken.

It was fun to see old scenes like the one where you'd get Shady some help to expand his business

I think I've fixed all the background/foreground glitches. I say "I think" because while diving into the scripts of book 2 I found a scene which I had forgotten and not unlocked during the play through so there might be more of those.

While doing that I noticed some scenes can be done in a far more efficient way. They'd look and play the same, but with 75% less script. I'm hoping (and expecting) once I'm done with all the changes I want to make, it'll result in a faster bootup time for FET.

I realize FET's bootup speed isn't that important since you do it once and afterwards it's not much of a problem, but it's just a personal annoyance which will only keep growing with the addition of book 4's love route and the final chapter, so I wanted to  make a real effort to keep it at least as limited as much as possible. I'm guessing it's mostly me indulging myself, but I do think it'll be worth it in the long run.

I'm not expecting to have all the things I want to change finished anytime soon. I keep discovering new stuff which can be done better. This rabbit hole goes deep! However I also can't just ignore what I'm supposed to be doing, which is drawing the stuff for the new route!

I had already sent 99% of the files to the coder so it's not like he couldn't start work on it, but there was still some temp art among it and it's nicer to work with drawings which don't look like they've been drawn on toilet paper with crayons so I'm happy to say I'm getting close to finalizing most of those temp images.

I better, because I've set myself a deadline. Once August has arrived I'll need to start working on the images for the second love route build. 

I'm on track for that, and I'll just keep fixing up older script stuff to make FET's insides all nice and shiny. But it'll be more of a side thing from now on, happening in the background. 

I went really hardcore these last weeks and it has given me a good idea of how much time and effort it will take to update everything I want. A long time. So we'll keep using the messy version for now,  which means your savegames are still safe(ish). 

It'd be nice if we can eventually have a 1.0 version with all the script changes at once so any savegame incompatibility happens just once.

There are some extra benefits to me doing this now. For example, I found an old bug from way back during the slave route for book 2 when fighting earthbenders together with Azula so that's at least going to be fixed in the "messy" version. 

Since I've been doing a lot of typing I noticed the little "braille" ridges on my F and J keys have slowly eroded into nothingness. It's surprising how much I miss those little bumps when it comes to guiding my fingers  to the right keys!  A matter of not appreciating something until it's not (or hardly) there anymore.

Oh and the coder got pretty sick for a short while and even went to get himself checked out for covid since he was feeling so bad. He's better again and it turned out to be a normal flu. Longtime patrons of ours will know cbob has a habit of picking up whatever virus is going around so I was  pretty much already convinced he had corona. Knowing him he's going to get it sometime sooner or later anyway though :/ ! 

But right now he's ready to rock again, which is good, because the calendar keeps shedding days like's hairs on a dog. Which is a lot! Hmm... crap. I made myself sad just now.

Well, whatever! I've been having a strange sort of  "on the spectrum"  kind of fun doing nothing but digging into our files, but it's time for me to get out of that hole and focus on other important stuff which is also fun.

And for everyone new here. Since we're working on the start of a new route, a new build is still at least a month away! That's all for now, going to bed and get myself some sleep!

Cheers!